The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Certain network service assurance tasks require continuous monitoring of the systems that are used to deliver an end-to-end networking service. For example, interactive video requires monitoring end-to-end service levels and statistics at various systems along communication paths to determine whether any service bottlenecks exist. A bottleneck may occur when, for example, one or more links along the communication path is excessively utilized.
Another example of such service tasks involves path monitoring to determine potential trouble spots, which could include one or more systems along the communication path that cause a high loss of packets as video data is transmitted. A network administrator can monitor interactive video and path monitoring by configuring monitoring functions on routers and switches and observing result data.
While monitoring a video stream can be useful, monitoring communication paths is CPU-intensive, and hence should be performed sparingly. In fact, due to the large amount of CPU resources required, usually only a small fraction of video flows can be monitored. Most often, video monitoring along certain communication paths is disabled by network administrators. Alternatively, video monitoring might be turned on only when needed, but monitoring data will be available and capable of retrieval only for those video flows for which monitoring was turned on earlier.
Continuous monitoring of communication paths, and each of the systems along the paths, may involve considerable effort and is usually performed inefficiently. For instance, monitoring typically involves configuring monitoring functions on more systems than necessary, and provides more information than required.
Moreover, once set up, monitoring of the paths is usually kept in place much longer than necessary. As a result, effectiveness of service assurance activities is limited and may cause considerable waste of management bandwidth and CPU cycles because a great deal of the collected data is never used.